Caves and Kayaks in a Quiet Corner of Thailand

Light drifts into Christmas Cave.Credit...Russ Juskalian for The New York Times

By Russ Juskalian

Oct. 7, 2011

MY mother shot me a concerned look. “No,” I said, anticipating her question, “This isn’t our stop.” I knew what she was thinking: This is exactly what we were trying to avoid.

After hundreds of gut-testing curves along a mountain road, the minibus we were riding in had stopped to exchange passengers in the once tranquil northern Thailand town of Pai. Here, in profusion, were unsettling signs of a backpacker-cum-new-age gold rush: yoga studios, tattoo parlors, banana roti, yurts, patchwork and reclaimed fabric clothing, countless guesthouses and scores of cafes (a few with flat-screen TVs) selling “organic” everything. All of it was bathed in free Wi-Fi. All of it was overwhelmed by gridlocked traffic.

Our destination, 90 minutes and a mountain away, was the Shan village of Ban Tham Lod, a sort of anti-Pai where I hoped to experience the Thai countryside in shades of how it used to be. My parents, both retired teachers, were joining me for two days before moving on to a volunteer gig.

Fewer than 10 miles from the Myanmar border, Cave Lodge, the guesthouse where we were staying, was situated among the simple teak homes of Ban Tham Lod.No tattoo parlors, only hill-tribe villages for neighbors and a karst-and-mist landscape where hundreds of caves lay hidden beneath thick vines and towering dipterocarp, kapok and teak trees. Cave Lodge’s owner, an Aussie named John Spies, has lived in this remote district, Pang Mapha, for over 30 years. He is as close to being a local as an outsider here gets.

On the first day, my mother and I arranged to go kayaking on the Nam Lang river, which flowed by the balcony of my simple bungalow. Our guide, a 43-year-old local man named Ten, had ropy quadriceps and a quizzical smile. He bounced down the steep slope from the lodge to the river, his kayak in one arm, paddle in another, momentarily looking back at us with mild amusement before springing back up the hill to help his less physically adept charges. Last in a single file line of kayaks — it was just the three of us, each in our own boat — I paddled slowly, listening to the hollow thwock-thwock of a water buffalo bell coming from the riverbank. The warmth of the sun, which had only just burned off the morning mist, felt great.

Not very far from Cave Lodge, the river flowed into the mouth of Tham Lod, or “through cave.” On bamboo rafts illuminated by lanterns, guides were ferrying a mix of Thai and foreign visitors into the five-story opening. I kayaked beneath the gaping entrance and, as the last rays of natural light faded behind a bend, switched on my headlamp. The interior of Tham Lod was over 100 feet wide in some places, its ceiling covered in long stalactites mottled by the reflections of the water below.

In the middle of the cave, we pulled up to a gravelly beach and set off on foot. Ten led the way up a slippery path, pointing out geologic formations sprouting from the floor and ceiling, and forming flowstone columns where stalactites and stalagmites grew together. After poking around, we returned to the kayaks and followed the river out the opposite side of the cave.

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Credit...The New York Times

The rest of the way, we ran small rapids down the Nam Lang’s winding curves beneath blue-gray limestone cliffs. Near the takeout point, dozens of children were swimming in a pond that had formed behind a small dam. Soon, I had five new passengers, transforming my one-man kayak into a semibuoyant mass of flailing arms and laughter.

That evening, around sundown, my parents and I returned to the exit of Tham Lod by following a footpath through the woods. We walked by a dry rice field and a small Buddhist forest monastery, listening to a growing chorus of sharp clicks and tweets.

At the exit of the cave, a torrent of Pacific swifts, by some estimates 300,000, swirled through the pastel sky like an endless school of airborne fish. More spectacular than their sheer numbers was the fact that the birds were flying into Tham Lod. “They’ve adapted to cave life,” Mr. Spies had told me earlier in the day. “It’s an incredible show.”

The next day, I nestled into a hammock at Cave Lodge’s main building, an open-air veranda on stilts, under a roof of dried leaves. (At night, when the temperatures drop, the veranda takes on a communal atmosphere, with everyone huddled around a central fire pit.)

I had planned only to skim Mr. Spies’s self-published memoir, “Wild Times: 30 Years on the Thai Border,” but ended up reading all 149 pages. The stories, starting with his naïve arrival in Thailand in the 1970s, and seven years trekking in the mountains, are not what you expect a guesthouse owner to have on offer. There are yarns from decades ago, when fields of opium poppies colored the hillsides and the heroin trade fueled lawlessness and rogue armies. The chronicles of speleological exploration — leading the Princess of Thailand through Tham Lod, and BBC film crews in search of troglobite fish — made me want to set out for subterranean adventures myself.

Inspired by Mr. Spies’s tales, I spent the next few days exploring the countryside with other guests. I made two visits to Christmas Cave, which was hidden around the back of a limestone knob, unmarked except for a footpath through a field of tall, parched corn stalks and a trickling stream leading to its opening. One large chamber had vaulted ceilings high enough to fit an oak tree. Light streamed down from the entrances evenly spaced atop its dome. Inside were brilliant sparkling formations that looked like brain coral dipped in shattered glass.

I also investigated Hair Cave, a long, humid tunnel with small and medium spaces arranged along a central, tubelike structure. Inside, I walked by a spider with narrow legs long enough to spread across my face, and spotted a pair of insects whose buzzing wings sounded like an electric rattle and whose bodies emitted bright red lights like strobing LEDs.

In other caves, called Tham Pi Maen (“tall spirit caves”), I examined 1,700-year-old coffins carved out of teak; according to local Shan lore, they are the resting places of slender spirits who haunt the forest, though the discovery of bone and tooth fragments in and near some of the coffins suggest a human origin. And, deep in the woods, I bumped into a Ph.D. candidate from Bangkok. The man, who said it was his seventh year of conservation fieldwork, spoke of his encounters with bandits, missionaries and primates.

One morning, I woke up at 5 and stumbled to the Cave Lodge veranda with two helmets, two headlamps and the sluggishness that comes with having spent too long the night before in a homemade herbal sauna thick with lemongrass-and-ginger-infused steam. Jérôme, a Frenchman with whom I had hatched the morning’s plan the night before, was already waiting. We downed strong coffee and set off for a vertical pillar of limestone shrouded in trees, called Big Knob.

Using a photocopy of Mr. Spies’s hand-drawn map, we walked through Ban Tham Lod village — by the temple, the clinic and the school — in the dark. The morning embers of cooking fires flickered from within teak houses on stilts. As we climbed through fog in a primeval forest, the sun, still hidden behind an uneven horizon, gave us enough light to turn off our headlamps. Soon the hike turned vertical, and we scrambled up human-size outcrops of limestone using trees as handholds.

The top of the knob was bald rock, about 30 feet in diameter, with 300-degrees of vertiginous drop-offs around its perimeter. Jérôme and I sat on an unsteady plank of wood and took in the view below us: an endless ocean of fog, with mountains and knobs poking through like islands in the sea. When the sun finally rose above a ridgeline, the fog formed slow-motion waves, first rolling over mountains in the distance, and then over the Big Knob itself, engulfing us in white.

In the stillness of all this, just before the din of village life echoed up from the valleys below, I heard something I had never heard before in the wild: a group of gibbons calling through the forest to one another in melodic whoops. They were singing in an ancient language that, for a moment, I longed to understand.

IF YOU GO

HOW TO GET THERE

Air-conditioned minibuses leave Chiang Mai’s main bus terminal throughout the day, stopping in Pai, Pang Mapha/Soppong and Mae Hong Son City. The ride costs 250 baht, or about $8 at 30 baht to the dollar, and takes around four hours. Expect fantastic views as you speed through the mountains, but if you are susceptible to carsickness, plan accordingly, as you’ll encounter switchbacks and curves in the road.

You should get off the bus at Pang Mapha/Soppong, and ask to charter a ride to Cave Lodge, 20 minutes into the forest down a one-lane road. Motorcycle taxis will do the trip for around 80 baht per person, while a pickup truck will take as many people as you can fit for around 300 baht. Alternatively, call Cave Lodge ahead of time, and they will arrange a pickup from where you get off the bus.

Built into a slope overlooking a small river, Cave Lodge has a range of basic but comfortable accommodations: from beds in a dorm room (120 baht per person) to rustic teak bungalows (700 baht) on stilts with private bathrooms and small verandas with views of the river and forest. The operation is run like a big bed-and-breakfast, and the owner, John Spies, is as knowledgeable about the region as anyone you’re liable to meet in Thailand. Local people cook reasonably priced breakfasts, lunches and dinners (25 to 150 baht) in the main building — including a handful of Western staples, and many Thai and Shan specialties.

WHAT TO DO

The staff at Cave Lodge can arrange everything from half-day to overnight kayaking trips; easy treks through small caves to world-class underground caverns many miles long, only accessible via rappelling; visits to local villages; and much more. Call or e-mail ahead to inquire about arranging a more ambitious adventure, or to check on what activities are available based on current conditions.